Explaining it to the little man. It’s called bargaining.

Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller makes a couple of good points today.

First of all, the Sun-Times story on little man’s threats against the CTU puts the lede at the end of the story. Way down at the bottom, CTU Prez Karen Lewis says she agrees with the little man about a longer school day.

It’s seems like the little man won’t take yes for an answer.

They also both agree that any additional minutes to the school day need to be paid for.

That leaves the question of how many minutes and what should they be used for? Bureaucrats think the answer is just to do more. Classroom teachers, like Karen Lewis, know that just to do more is not enough.

Will the additional minutes be used for test prep, or expanding the curriculum with more music and art? Will it mean more student seat time, or time for teacher planning and collaborative discussions? Of course, those can be deadly, useless and awful as well.

Says Lewis, “We’re not having that discussion yet. We don’t make backroom deals. We have a different way of doing it. The conversation we need to have is what that [longer day] will look like.”

That’s called collective bargaining.